Having followed the American health-care reform debate since the 2008 election campaign, it is clear that this issue is very personal to every American. It is also clear that this issue of health-care is not only about the substantive question of how do the citizens of the worlds richest and most powerful country go about attaining health-care coverage, but it also asks the underlining ideological question, what sort is country is America today, in the year 2010?
I want to concentrate on the Republicans in this piece, I feel many things have been written about Obama and the Democrats’ journey to Sunday, 21st March 2010 already.
I am struck by many worrying things when I try to analyse what this means to the Republicans, but I’ll just list three.
Yes, Republicans may very well win big come November, but that could point to a well established historical mid-term elections trend, rather than the public’s dissatisfaction with healthcare and the Obama administration. The same public, which the GOP claimed to be set against Obama and his ObamaCare, voted for Obama in 2008, when he was campaigning on a healthcare heavy platform – and advocating for a much more liberal bill then the one today. So this notion that Obama and the Democrats will be slaughtered because of healthcare does not stack up. If anything, they might get slaughtered because the bill is not liberal enough and their base is less ‘fired up and ready to go’ than the Republicans’. The 50% approval rating which the GOP are seeing is not because Independents are losing faith with Obama, but its because Liberals are frustrated with the President. This bill may very well lift some of those frustrations.
Secondly, I also fear for the Republicans because of how they have positioned themselves image wise throughout this whole debate. Again, there is a simple and fair argument that could be made that throughout this debate, Republicans haven’t been honest in their intentions to engage in the legislative process. Early on in the debate, Obama was being lampooned by the left for giving in too easily to Republican demands and ideas (many of which are still in the final bill) which produced barely any bi-partisan fruit. Obama started off looking Jimmy Carter naive and ended this debate being the Democrats’ Reagan. More to the point, the Republicans started this debate looking like statesmen who were willing to make a good thing out of a bad situation and finished the debate with the worst legislative defeat in decades. While many Republicans believe they can gain mileage out of campaigning to repeal the healthcare bill, I very much doubt that the fight is as easy as it looks. Its fine fighting against an ambiguous, scary sounding ‘ObamaCare’ bill, but when that bill allows parents to cover their children until they are 26 years of age, stops insurers from not accepting people with pre-existing conditions – when that bill covers 32 million people who otherwise didn’t have healthcare (all before the pain of what I agree is the biggest increase in taxes America has ever seen), the Republicans might find that fighting against this bill might not be fertile ground after all.
Thirdly, this debate exposed the ugly side of the Republicans. Say what you will about the other side, they haven’t been openly associating themselves with a group of people that finally went too far during the weekend of the bill’s passage. To stand outside a balcony, waving signs and flags to a crowd which has just yelled homophobic remarks to a member of the House of Representatives and yelled racist remarks to a Civil Rights hero shows how desperate, ugly and short term the Republicans’ strategy is. Whether they like it or not, in the coming two decades, the ethnic minority will not be such a minority — and their actions during this debate could impact on whether this soon to be important voting block will align themselves with their party or the Democrats.
In short, the Republicans better believe that this is a loss to them.
Even when they win seats in November, they have to address the underlining issues their party faces. They still lack direction and they still lack purpose – saying no to everything Obama throws at them will not be enough to lift them out of their funk.
They are just my observations. I doubt very much that the Republicans will heed the words of a 23 year old, Malawian born British citizen who enjoys his government run healthcare coverage.
But they might be better off if they do…
Just a normal everyday bloke writing about films.